A Lone Louisiana Lawyer's Fight against Trump's Deportations
Nowhere are there so many immigration detention centers in such a small area as in Louisiana. Lawyer Christopher Kinnison is doing his best to help the immigrants. But it's not easy.
By Jonah Lemm in Alexandria, Louisiana
Christopher Kinnison is going to lose today. Again. He senses it as he gets into his car at noon, lays his pinstriped suit jacket and stack of papers on the back seat and drives out of the city, past the fast-food restaurants and the low houses that always look, here in rural Louisiana, like they’re trying to hide from the eyes of strangers. He senses it as he turns onto the highway, flanked by green forests and farms, and as he drives along the country road, lined with wooden power poles looking like giant crosses. Outside, it’s fall and summer at the same time, the Southern heat shimmering over the asphalt and the sky glowing blue as if a child has colored it in with crayons.
In some of these areas, 90 percent of the populace voted for Donald Trump. Indeed, it feels like a promotional film backdrop for this president’s vision of America: a simple, orderly world. Kinnison keeps his eyes stubbornly on the road. His world has been crazier than ever for several months. Sometimes, he doesn’t seem to understand it himself anymore.
He drives without the help of GPS; the route has become familiar to him by now – the route to the small town of Jena, home of the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, one of Trump’s more than 200 deportation centers. It is a box-like building, surrounded by barbed wire and forest. A prefab fortress, thrown up in the middle of nowhere, logging country.
Many of Kinnison’s clients are locked up here. The one on today’s schedule has been here for two months – a man who once came illegally to the U.S. from Mexico. Today Kinnison will try to defend him. He parks his car between rows of SUVs and walks to a chain-link gate.
Kinnison, a thin man, his hair trimmed short and gray just like his beard, presses a button. A few seconds pass, during which his body tenses up. Then, a buzz sounds and the lock springs open. Kinnison enters, walks through a beeping scanner, past a human-sized U.S. flag, past a sobbing woman with smeared mascara, past a huge yellow container reading “ICE Trash.” ICE is short for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. immigration police. They are apparently producing quite a bit of garbage here.
He turns into a narrow hallway with a tile floor. On one wall hang candy, chips and chocolate bars, neatly arranged, as snacks for the guards and police officers in the corridors. An officer opens the door to Courtroom 2, a windowless brick space. Behind a desk sits a judge, a blonde woman in glasses. “Mr. Kinnison!” she says brightly. The always affable Kinnison nods to her and says, “Good to see you!” He takes a seat on a cushioned chair and sets his thick stack of papers on the table.
The first sheet on the pile bears a name. But it doesn’t matter. In Trump’s deportation centers, almost no one knows the migrants by their names. Instead, they are identified by Alien Numbers. The first page of Kinnison’s documents reads: A089-847-562. Kinnison has never before spoken with the man he will soon be trying to save. It was the man’s wife who called him after her husband had been arrested. He doesn’t know much about A089-847-562 – or perhaps he won’t reveal what he knows because he doesn’t want to violate attorney-client privilege.
A089-847-562, as Kinnison has noted down, has lived in the U.S. for 20 years. He has an American wife and five children – rather a decent starting point, one might think, for avoiding deportation. But under Trump, Kinnison says, there is no such thing for the vast majority of migrants. The only starting points that seem to exist are bad, very bad and impossible.
Perhaps A089-847-562 is a craftsman, maybe he works on a farm, maybe as a nursing home aide, maybe he loves his family, maybe he hates them. Maybe he once swam through the Rio Grande, maybe smugglers drove him across the border. Who knows? None of that will be the focus of today’s hearing.
Kinnison is here to apply for his client’s release on bond. It used to be routine for people who had once come illegally to the U.S. but had lived here for years, had family, had relatives who were U.S. citizens or a job, people like A089-847-562, to be released on bond. But in early September, a court in the U.S. decided: No one who once entered the U.S. illegally can be released on bond by an immigration court. All those who have been arrested must remain locked up. At the end of November, a class action lawsuit will successfully challenge this ruling before a federal court. But that will come too late for Kinnison and the man from Mexico. Anyway, it’s a constant back-and-forth under Trump.
“This has nothing to do with due process anymore,” Kinnison said in the car. He refers to the proceedings that are about to begin as a “circus.”
Let the show begin.
